On the morning of June 5, 1967, I did not need my little Westclox travel alarm to rouse me from my bed at the Nile Hilton. The Israeli Air Force did the job.

A series of low-pitched booms shook the windows of my room, and I learned later that Israeli Mirage warplanes had hit the military airport at Cairo West. The Egyptian Ministry of Information, which fed reporters in Cairo a series of totally false war communiqués over the next few days, insisted that Egypt had destroyed most of the Israeli Air Force. The truth was just the opposite (as I could see by looking up at the sky as Israeli jets kept returning for more strikes), but the Syrian and Jordanian governments believed the Egyptian communiqués and lost most of their own warplanes when they joined the fight against Israel.

By the end of the Six Day War, Israel had captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Desert and the Golan Heights. Two months later, the humiliated Arabs proclaimed their three noes –no peace, no negotiations, no recognition. They missed an historic opportunity to trade peace for land.

Forty years later, that deal is finally on the table in the form of the Arab Peace Initiative. The Arabs are offering Israel full relations with the entire Arab world if it returns to its pre-1967 borders and accepts a “just” solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, but Israel is in no mood to respond.

I still have somewhere in my collection of mementos an Israeli tee shirt with “It takes two to tango” printed on it – an ironic souvenir of Egyptian President Sadat's 1977 visit to Jerusalem. Ironic, because there is now no partner to dance with in Israel. The current Kadima-Labor coalition government is too fragile to make the necessary concessions. If it falls apart and new elections are held, it could be replaced by the Likud Party, whose leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, does not even accept the idea of a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu does, however, recognize that the Palestinians actually exist, and in the painfully slow evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem that might even be seen as progress. Prime Minister Gold Meir, the Labor party leader who came to power in Israel after the Six Day War, once snapped back at me during an interview, “What do you mean by Palestinians? Look, I'm a Palestinian!” She showed me her old ID card from the pre-independence days when Britain ruled the Palestine Mandate.

The sad fact is that most Israelis now put more faith in the ugly barrier they have erected to separate Israelis from Palestinians than they do in peace plans. And it's even sadder that the Palestinians are so caught up in their own internal power struggle that they could not say “yes” even if Israel wanted to dance.

And of course the United States is already in the early stages of a presidential election campaign that will probably rule out any meaningful American peace initiative in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until at least 2009.

So, forty years later, the Arabs have arrived at the dance hall, only to find that it's empty.